“This is about feeding the soldiers of the green left to affect the outcome of the 2020 elections,” Dan Kish, a distinguished senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Bloomberg will announce his “Beyond Carbon” plan during his commencement speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With this new spending, Bloomberg will have committed roughly $1 billion to the climate crusade since leaving the mayor’s office.

“This campaign will ensure that after the 2020 election, the next Administration inherits a country on its way to a 100 percent clean energy economy,” Bloomberg said.

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Beyond Carbon has four goals — lobby states to pass 100 percent “clean” energy laws, funnel more money to environmentalists, expand existing anti-fossil fuel campaigns and get “climate champions” elected to state and local office.

More than 280 coal plants have closed or been slated for closure since 2010, The New York Times reported. Beyond Carbon, Bloomberg says, will aim to close the remaining 241 coal plants by 2030.

Coal power generation and mining employed 160,119 American workers in 2016, according to the U.S. Energy Department. The coal industry has been in decline over the past decade due to federal and state regulations as well as competition from natural gas.

“The loss of fuel-secure electricity sources, especially coal-fueled power plants, pose an increasing threat to the power grid, as well as to national security,” said Michelle Bloodworth, president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which represents coal producers, utilities and railroads.

“While a political campaign aimed at closing all coal plants may make for an attractive soundbite in some quarters, it is not a responsible plan that our policymakers should adopt,” Bloodworth told TheDCNF.

The cost to replace all that shuttered coal capacity would also be staggering, ClearView Energy Partners director Kevin Book told The Times. He estimated replacing coal with wind and solar power — and the necessary battery storage — would cost $950 billion.

“It’s not going to be easy to do what he’s talking about doing,” Book told the Times.

“We will employ the same advocacy, legal, and electoral strategies that have proven so successful in retiring coal-fired power plants … and also in passing gun safety background check laws in states around the country,” Bloomberg said.

Conservative critics, however, see Bloomberg’s campaign as an attack on working men and women, often union members, that used to be the backbone of the Democratic Party.

“Bloomberg just made a half-billion dollar contribution to Democrats, who have abandoned American working people and the unions who represent them for the faculty lounge and the students they brainwash to worry about the weather,” Kish said.

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About Michael Bastasch

One comment

Just imagine if that self promoting, egotistical, narcissistic POS put that money into helping the homeless or drug dependency organizations? Lets put our money towards lobbying and green groups that don’t actually HELP anyone instead. The hypocrisy of the left astonishes me.